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About a month ago I did a training which was basically an introduction to social action. As part of this training I wrote up a scenario about alien invasion which I gave out to prompt discussion about social action strategy, tactics, and the process of organizing. I was very happy with how this worked, and want to share the scenario.

Here it is:

After a long protracted struggle, aliens from outer space have conquered the Earth. In ___ (insert country where this training is happening) they have not changed the basic governmental structure. However, they have established a society where the majority of people are paid less than what is necessary to survive; although most do survive through activity in the informal economy and/or through debt (which is largely owned by aliens; who now control the financial industry). Many humans are also imprisoned, and the legal system (both the courts and the police) tend to primarily protect alien interests. The highest offices of authority are held almost exclusively by aliens while a lower strata of authority is maintained by humans, most of whom have come to emphatically endorse alien rule. Elections and voting still exist, although people must always choose between very pro-alien candidates. The aliens also do not need this planet and are willing to push the Earth’s resources to their capacity in order to produce valuable goods in the overall alien empire. As a result, climate change and energy scarcity have intensified. Schools and the media largely portray alien rule as normal and natural, and the majority of humans accept this perspective. While there are pockets of rebellion, most feel powerless to change things. Many people say “that’s just the way it is,” when discussing perceived unfairness in their world. However many people do wish for change, and they occasionally gather for this purpose. You are a group of people gathering for change [Note, for this sentence I actually named the group I was working with in my original write-up, but you can insert whatever group you want here]. How might you direct your energy towards a better world?

The overt purpose of this scenario was to spark a discussion on strategy, tactics, and organizing. The scenario also had a covert purpose of sparking social analysis. It fulfilled both purposes better than I expected; with participants enthusiastically throwing out their ideas and very quickly realizing that the scenario actually described the world we already live in.

Feel free to use the scenario if you like. If you do, realize that people will probably ask questions about things that are not stated in the scenario. My answers reflected my understanding of the world we currently live in (with aliens basically replacing the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people). Also, I treated the aliens as though they had both good and bad traits and were not all of one mind, even though they all did benefit (in some way) from the exploitation of humanity as a whole. One of the pitfalls I see in this scenario is that it can dehumanize, which I would try to avoid. But I think overall this is a very nice tool for sparking our social action imagination while deepening our analysis.

I believe there is a very old and shared dream of liberation, a vision for a world which we can imagine but find difficult to create. To me this vision is defined by the good things which already exist in life, and the possibility that this good can grow.

My own experience of goodness is defined in stories. As a child I shared my fear of death with my mother and saw tremendous empathy in her eyes that was so beautiful it transcended my fears. I grew up struggling with wanting support from people that I never seemed to get, but then felt great fulfillment when I was able to give that support to others. I have had my spirit shattered as I learned of how I benefit from war, poverty, and the systematic oppression of the majority of humanity; then my spirit has been reconfigured into greater wholeness once I committed to a better world. I have felt true togetherness when crying on someone’s shoulder; and the healing that comes when we cry together. I have been inspired by the risks others have taken to make their behavior consistent with their values; by, for example, fighting global warming, dictatorship, or racial oppression. I have felt my sense of the human family expand as I marched in solidarity over values of basic worth and dignity. In all this and more I see liberation in a formative state, the dream of what the world can be, struggling to be realized.

“Liberation” was not always the word I used to identify my dream. As a child I named my desire “peace.” I saw a lot of beauty as well as ugliness in the world and believed that it was our role as human beings to embrace the beautiful–things like compassion, friendship, and appreciation. In meditation I felt these good things and found a frequent sense of peace, of rightness with the world. I believed that if we all could just discover this peace for ourselves then the world as a whole would be at peace, and that was what I wanted to live for.

When I was around ten this vision was challenged. I saw my peers en masse start to say things like “I’m not good enough,” “I’m stupid,” and “I’m ugly.” To me these statements were heartwrenching because I believed the opposite, and reeled at the idea that the people I loved would hate themselves.

I told my friends that I believed in them; that they were good, smart, worthy, etc. But time and again I could see that my words were rejected. Eventually I saw my friends entering new levels of competition over basic recognition and social respect. To be recognized we had to dominate. We had to prove who was the smartest; who was the most attractive; who was the strongest. This competition increasingly involved putdowns and bullying. I was a target. I felt so much unnecessary pain and saw that same pain moving throughout the world as children degraded each other.

I had years of nightmares, suicidal thoughts, and trying to avoid the outside world. But, despite this pain, I could still see the profoundness of life. For years I had an inner battle between misery and the commitment to resist misery. Eventually something shifted in me. I remember a nightmare where I was chased by a monster (as I had been so many times before). But unlike before I did not wake in a cold sweat, but turned around and killed that monster. Then I brought it back to life. Then I made a world of monsters who danced in simple joy. Though it was all in my head I experienced liberation which went beyond the peace I had experienced before. This was not just good feelings, but greater clarity over what was worth living for after winning a conflict between the life affirming and the life negating. I had found some freedom from the weight of depression, and from the ubiquitous hatred that caused my depression.

Yet again it must be stated that this was liberation in a formative state. It was personal triumph, but only a small change in a world that is much bigger than my head. Over the years I still saw the same story repeated again and again of people I cared about hating themselves, and most of what I said to counter this had little affect. Eventually I realized that my beliefs held little weight because I was not respected as authority. Someone with greater authority already told people that they did not measure up; and I began to see clearer who that authority was.

Girls would describe themselves as ugly while looking at fashion magazines. I had a bully that stabbed me in the leg with pencils in order to “toughen me up” who was abused by his father. Kids doubted their intelligence while adults told them that their entire future depended on them defeating each other in an endless competition for grades, recognition, and status. So many authorities had a tendency towards dehumanization, stripping us of inherent worth and treating us as tools.

When I learned more about history I could start seeing this even more clearly. European elites created empires which conquered the world, subjugated its people, took their resources, destroyed their cultures, engulfed the planet in World Wars, and pushed workers into the worst conditions they could stomach in order to maximize the profit of a few. The world of today has inherited all of this pain. We have normalized the idea that it is the rightful place of authority to abuse, and the powerful of today continue to reap benefits from inequity.

In my moments of peace I have seen what life can be if we can find freedom from injustice. But experiencing moments of peace is not enough to create this freedom. My happiness does not change the exploitation of humans. As such it does not change the exploitation of me as a human, and my momentary peace can be nothing more than momentary. To truly find greater freedom there must be resistance. At the same time, I can resist injustice in a way that ultimately provides nothing better. I can use my hurt as an excuse to hurt others, leading to no net improvements in the state of humanity.

Liberation falls into neither pitfall of resistance without purpose nor self satisfaction without social conscience. Liberation is instead the simultaneous resistance of injustice and embrace of peace that is both the means and the ends to a world which genuinely serves our needs. This combined resistance of injustice and embrace of peace is a journey taken by both the individual and the many collectives which define the individual. Ultimately liberation is a long process which requires both struggle and reflection on the meaning of our struggles. Liberation must be learned, and learning liberation is the best thing I can think to do with my life.

Over the holidays I went to the movies and saw Les Miserables. It was an emotional experience which got me in the reflective mood. As I watched the revolutionaries struggle and die I felt a strange sensation, a growing internal conviction that I no longer wish to think of myself as better or worse than anyone else. Perhaps this is my newest resolution (which just so happens to fall near the new year).

Losing the desire to be better than others goes against much that I was taught growing up. As a child I remember wanting to be special, and competing with other children to prove that I was. I remember boys performing feats of strength in gym class or feats of numeric processing in math. We measured each other in order to decide who was worthy and unworthy. Such measurement then expressed itself in envy towards the achievers and abuse towards the underachievers. And, as we measured each other, the school measured us with grades and test scores. For me, I felt a desire to compete that I think came from other peoples’ expectations of me but my heart was never in it. In school I saw the stress of the overachievers and determined that I did not want to be like them. Outside of school my father enrolled his sons in wrestling. I often won informal matches during practices but could not stand the pressure once there was competition between teems and an audience in the bleachers. Yet looking back I realize that, while I became uninterested in competing with people athletically or scholastically, I embraced a sort of moral competition. I did want to be superior.

I have spent a good deal of my life watching others and judging them in order to convince myself that I was better than them. I have listened to the words of good people who meant me no harm and, from the safety of my unspoken thoughts, I have thrown litanies of vulgarity at them. This includes things like,

Why are you wasting my time?

That thing she said was stupid

He is an idiot

I would never get myself in that situation

You are not as special as me, and also

racist, classist, sexist, and ableist epithets

These thoughts were never the only ideas I had about people but they would pop into my head, and they often disturbed me. My mind went back and forth between, I deeply admire you, and, you’re a piece of shit; and these contradicting ideas would exist at the same time about the same person. As I grew up I came to notice my judgmental hostility more and more. Meanwhile I desired more and more compassionate ways of relating with people. Through much meditation and self-help experimentation my ability to listen grew and my tendency to judge lessened. Then, as I noticed these changes, I became oppressively smug. I wore my moral victories as a badge to prove that I was superior. This had always been a hidden motivation for me… or perhaps it was a motivation hidden from me though obvious to everyone who knew me.

Eventually I realized that the self was really constructed by society (for example, kids judging other kids is learned by how the school system judges kids via grades). As I figured this out I shifted from a self-help focus to a social change/collective liberation focus. Now I think that my desire to feel special was a predictable response to a society that runs off of artificial scarcity. Basically, we need to prove that we are special in order to prove that we are worthy to receive the resources we must compete over (for example, money). Only a small minority of us are able to have truly secure livelihoods, have our ideas represented in government or the media, find work that is appropriately challenging and fulfilling, and be taken seriously by the people around us. In a socially just world these things would not be treated as scarce privileges but instead as basic human needs. However we live in a world which normalizes and indoctrinates us into accepting less than we deserve; and we behave according to the world we are indoctrinated into.

I also came to see how my desire to be special reinforced racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, and other forms of oppression. The privileges afforded to me by my white skin, Y chromosome assigned male identity*, and parents’ income give me an upper hand in the competition for those scarce societal resources. For example, as a man I am not expected to cook and clean and do the daily domestic work. My father did not do this. Many fathers and grandfathers I have known did not do this. Unpaid and under valued domestic labor has been the role given to women. This privileges me and other men because, without having responsibility for domestic chores, I am afforded more time, freedom, and respect when I chose to pursue the things which will actually earn me that scarce societal recognition. I have more time to work and to play. I have more time to network and more expectation that I will not be home with the kids. I have more access to the language and culture of men who, overall, hold more power. And it is a challenge for me to resist this privilege by, for example, spending an equal amount of time as my wife on domestic chores. This is because I am scared of giving up the privilege that helps me to compete, get what I want from life, and not be as exploited as others.

Lessons about the basic mechanics of privilege and oppression were taught to me in my twenties. But, even as I have learned how the competition for superiority is just a tool of artificial scarcity by a dehumanizing societal machine, I have held on to the child’s dream of being recognized as special and extraordinary (which are ultimately just nicer sounding ways of saying “superior”). But I have a growing sense of the vanity in this child’s dream because convincing myself that I am special does not actually provide me with the world I wish to see. I wish for true love, true friendship, and true camaraderie. I wish to be with people, to share in their joys and their struggles. I wish for no accolades, no shallow rewards, no teacher’s stars to measure zir favor (zir is a gender neutral pronoun; like his or her). Liberation is my desire, and I believe it is only possible when we lose the ambition to become better than others and the fear that we are worse.

Like all good resolutions, I need help to maintain this. I expect to fail often and don’t really care because failure is part of the learning process. But I would like for people to show me where I am wrong because that helps me learn as well. In later posts I will explore what it means to live as though I am not better or worse than anyone else. This resolution entails an awful lot which I am excited to discover.

*I first wrote Y chromosome thinking that the Y chromosome was a trait that could represent many traits that are associated with being male. It was brought to my attention that this was cissexist because it excludes people who identify as male but do not have a Y chromosome and people who have a Y chromosome but don’t identify as male. In other words, having a Y chromosome does not necessarily mean you have a male identity. I found a link to another blog which describes cissexism in more detail.